Congress is currently on the verge of passing patent reform legislation.

As far as we know, no changes has been made to those types of patents. It was a wasted opportunity although no real opportunity was ever given to substantial changes. It’s like asking a stubborn teenager to tidy up a messy room, whereupon the teen just sprays the room and calls it “job done”.

A German court has banned all TV sets and cars from being sold in Germany. A judge said, “They all look the same.” The Court based this decision on the recent decision made by the Düsseldorf Regional Court. The court said that no other company other than Apple can sell tablets in Germany as it thinks all tablets look like the iPad.

The German court this morning upheld a ban on the Samsung Galaxy Tab stating that it looks too much like the iPad. The media around the globe has been providing evidence that not only Apple’s design patent is invalid as there are examples of prior art, but also that it’s completely different from the Galaxy Tab.

On a more serious note, “German Court Upholds Ban On Samsung Galaxy Tab” is the news, with Slashdot summarising it as follows: “It seems Samsung has finally lost the battle against Apple in Germany. Today the district court in Düsseldorf ruled that Samsung must not sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Germany. Furthermore, it has banned Samsung Germany from selling the Galaxy Tab 10.1 anywhere in Europe.”

As one USENET poster points out: “Will this stupidity never end? When will Apple fight competition on product value in an open market instead of resorting to bullying tactics in the courts?”

It is being reported that Android is about to beat iOS in terms of application downloads. This is the real reason Apple is suing. “Android to overtake Apple in app downloads” says the headline of the new article which has these numbers :

Android could notch 8.1 billion app downloads this year, compared with 6 billion for Apple’s iOS devices. That marks an explosion of growth for both platforms; Apple had 2.7 billion downloads and Android recorded 1.4 billion last year. The total number of application downloads is expected to grow by 144 percent this year, Ovum said in a report issued today.

No wonder Mr. Jobs is angry. Apple is exploiting a broken system — a system that should be fixed before it causes yet more damage. Cablegate has some useful material on the process of legislation the public is not allowed to know about (sensitive and/or classified “confidential”). Joy ahead thanks to Wikileaks. █

A couple of years ago Bartz [1, 2] and Ballmer posed for the cameras in the same way Elop and Ballmer did half a year ago and Hovsepian and Ballmer did in 2006. All those handshakes were the formal handover of car keys to Ballmer. Hovsepian was emitted from his chair a few months ago, Elop plans to leave next year (according to several sources), and Bartz has just been fired (after many former Microsoft executives had been installed inside Yahoo!). It is not as bad as it sounds. Their goal was accomplished as the companies they pretended to be CEOs of were put in the hands of Microsoft.

What does that teach us about deals with Microsoft? We have a special wiki page about it. Microsoft is very manipulative and this destroys good companies that once provided more choices to the market. Without choice, the monopoly or duopoly of Microsoft and Apple is under no pressure to actually innovate. They can also take away people’s technological rights, making antifeatures the ‘standard’. Techrights strives to expose this sheer anti-competitive abuse. █